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One of the topics I enjoy discussing at Indie Web Camps is how we can use design to display activity over time on personal websites. That’s how I ended up with sparklines on my site—it was the a direct result of a discussion at Indie Web Camp Nuremberg a year ago:

During the discussion at Indie Web Camp, we started looking at how silos design their profile pages to see what we could learn from them. Looking at my Twitter profile, my Instagram profile, my Untappd profile, or just about any other profile, it’s a mixture of bio and stream, with the addition of stats showing activity on the site—signs of life.

Perhaps the most interesting visual example of my activity over time is on my Github profile. Halfway down the page there’s a calendar heatmap that uses colour to indicate the amount of activity. What I find interesting is that it’s using two axes of time over a year: days of the month across the X axis and days of the week down the Y axis.

I wanted to try something similar, but showing activity by time of day down the Y axis. A month of activity feels like the right range to display, so I set about adding a calendar heatmap to monthly archives. I already had the data I needed—timestamps of posts. That’s what I was already using to display sparklines. I wrote some code to loop over those timestamps and organise them by day and by hour. Then I spit out a table with days for the columns and clumps of hours for the rows.

I’m using colour (well, different shades of grey) to indicate the relative amounts of activity, but I decided to use size as well. So it’s also a bubble chart.

It doesn’t work very elegantly on small screens: the table is clipped horizontally and can be swiped left and right. Ideally the visualisation itself would change to accommodate smaller screens.

It was great—travelling through the land of Steinbeck and Guthrie at the speed of Kerouac and Springsteen. We stopped for the night at Pismo Beach and then continued on, rolling into Santa Monica at sunset.

The weekend was spent in the usual Indie Web Camp fashion: a day of BarCamp-style discussions, followed by a day of hacking on our personal websites.

I did face a bit of a conundrum. Both my home page stream and my tag pages show posts in reverse chronological order, with the newest posts at the top. I’ve decided to replicate that for the archive view, but I’m not sure if that’s the right decision. Maybe the list of years should begin with 2001 and end with 2016, instead of the other way around. And maybe when you’re looking at a month of posts, you should see the first posts in that month at the top.

Anyway, I’ll live with it in reverse chronological order for a while and see how it feels. I’m just glad I managed to get it down—I’ve been meaning to do it for quite a while. Once again, I’m amazed by how much gets accomplished when you’re in the same physical space as other helpful, motivated people all working on improving their indie web presence, little by little.

I met Sandijs of Froont fame when I was in Austin for Artifact back in May. He mentioned how he’d like to put on an event in his home city of Riga, and I said I’d be up for that. So last weekend I popped over to Latvia to speak at an event he organised at a newly-opened co-working space in the heart of Riga.

That was on Friday, so Jessica I had the rest of the weekend to be tourists. Sandijs rented a car and took us out into the woods. There, in the middle of a forest, was an observatory: the Baldone Schmidt telescope.

The day we visited was the Summer soltice and we were inside the observatory getting a tour of the telescope at the precise moment that the astronomical summer began.

It’s a beautiful piece of machinery. It has been cataloging and analysing carbon stars since the ’60s.

Nowadays, the images captured by the telescope go straight into a computer, but they used to be stored on glass plates. Those glass plates are now getting digitised too. There’s one person doing all the digitising. It takes about forty minutes to digitise one glass plate. There are approximately 22,000 glass plates in the archive.

It’s going to be a long process. But once all that data is available in a machine-readable format, there will inevitably be some interesting discoveries to made from mining that treasure trove.

The telescope has already been used to discover a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt. It’s about 1.5 kilometers wide. Its name is Baldone.